The Act of Writing Things Down

In the two years I teach you science, we will go through almost 200 vocabulary words. That’s 200 times you will write out the definitions, and add the word to the index of your science notebooks.

That’s a lot of words and a lot of writing. 

When I ask, that’s the number one complaint students have about my class - all the writing and note taking. 

I understand - many of you find it boring. I know some of you hate it, but, here’s the thing…It works.

Really, the act of writing these words and definitions down on paper helps cement it in your mind.

Recently, I ran a little experiment: 

In one class, I printed out two words and definitions and asked my junior scientists to paste them in instead of writing them down. The other class wrote out the definitions as usual. Over the course of the next week, I featured the words in several Do Nows, they were used in a chapter we read, and they were both included in a study guide.

On a recent assessment, I asked all students to write out the definitions of the words. Twice as many in the group that originally wrote down the words got them correct compared with the group that pasted them in.

I think this is a pretty clear indicator - writing these vocab words down has value. I think you learn them faster and better because you have written them. I guess that process of seeing the words and definitions, hearing the words and definitions and writing the words and definitions gives your brains a better chance of holding on to that information.

So, we’re going to keep writing them down. Sorry, if you don’t like it, but it does work. 

I know this would never, ever happen, but I can imagine a group of students who take that paste-in and never actually read the words and definitions - they just mechanically paste the little hand-out into their notebooks and ignore the words printed on that paper. 

Like I said, I’m sure that would never happen with my young scholars, but you never really know, do you?